...Christopher Fry Harris was born in Bristol, England, on Dec. 18, 1907, the son of Charles John Harris, a master builder who became a full-time lay preacher in the Church of England, and the former Emma Marguerite Fry Hammond. When he was 4, his father died, and two years later his mother moved to Bedford, where she and her sister took in lodgers to help pay for schooling.

While still young, Christopher changed his last name to that of his maternal grandmother, who was thought, on what the dramatist later admitted to be "slight evidence," to be related to the family that produced the Victorian prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. Whatever the truth, Christopher eventually espoused the Fry clan's Quaker faith and became a lifelong pacifist.

….LONDON -- Playwright Christopher Fry, a Christian humanist who helped T.S. Eliot revive verse drama in the 1940s and wrote a number of epic films including "Ben Hur," has died at the age of 97, his son said.

Fry died on June 30 in the hospital in Chichester, southern England, Tam Fry said. The cause of death was not announced.

A master of whimsical comic verse, Fry's best-known plays, "The Lady's Not for Burning" (1948) and "Venus Observed" (1949), have a sense of benign providence and hope for humanity that struck a chord in a world still coming to terms with news of the Holocaust and the use of the atom bomb........As a Quaker, Fry was a conscientious objector and spent four years in the non-combat Pioneer Corps, then resumed writing works that included the comedy "A Phoenix Too Frequent" and "The Firstborn."